The Heirs of Babylon, Glen Cook
The Heirs of Babylon, Glen Cook
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

The Heirs of Babylon

Author: Glen Cook

Narrator: Curt Bonnem

Unabridged: 8 hr 27 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 02/25/2020

Categories: Fiction, Science Fiction


Synopsis

The dystopian politics of 1984 meet the naval warship backdrop of The Last Ship in fantasy master Glen Cook's reissued first novel, available for the first time in decades.

It is 2193, and still the war continues.

Two hundred years after nuclear and chemical weapons have nearly annihilated the global population, the last of mankind struggles on in isolated communities. Law and order is carried out by the Political Office, black-clad police who rule through fear and violence, commanding the world's survivors how to think, how to act, and when to obey the call to the Gathering: the ritual massing for war against an unknown and unseen Enemy.

Now the call has come, and all nations must pay tribute.

Kurt Ranke is a young man eking out an existence in the ruins of former Germany with his pregnant wife. But when the Gathering is called, he boards the decrepit destroyer Jäger—a once-mighty warship now more than two centuries old. Antiquated, broken-down, and running on steam, it wallows through uncharted waters carrying Ranke and a reluctant and ragtag group of soldiers en route to the Final Meeting: a battle from which it's rumored none have ever returned . . .

About Glen Cook

Glen Cook is the author of dozens of novels of fantasy and science fiction, including the Black Company series, the Garrett Files series, and The Tyranny of the Night. Cook was born in 1944 in New York City. He attended the Clarion Writers Workshop in 1970, where he met his wife, Carol.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Greg on March 19, 2019

A strange nightmare mishmash of Das Boat, The Road, and Heart of Darkness (although I've never read Heart of Darkness). It drags you along through a hellish world of endless war in a dying world.......more

Goodreads review by AoC on December 06, 2024

It's always interesting to go back to the origin story of your beloved authors, and The Heirs of Babylon is precisely that for Glen Cook as this is the very first novel credited to his real name. A lot of the style that came to define the man, whether you like it or not, is already here free of thos......more

Goodreads review by Jason on February 01, 2024

Sorry, can't recommend this to anyone. What I read is the soul weary cry of a battle survivor too spent to do anything or be anything other than a dreamer denier slipping through a world of fear and regret and naivety and ineffectualness. A story told about a world of hopelessness. And yet a story f......more

Goodreads review by Connor on August 04, 2022

This book introduced me to Glen Cook. I found his writing style very interesting, you are tossed right into the story with little explanation, letting the reader fill in the gaps themselves. I found myself feeling for Kurt as a soldier far from home who wondered why he had ever made this decision to......more

Goodreads review by Terence on December 10, 2008

I believe this was Cook's first published novel; if not, it was one of the first and it shows. You can see glimpses of what would make Cook a good author in later books and the cynical worldview that informs his work but the writing's awkward and derivative, and it's just not very good. If you're an a......more